And the rest is rust and stardust
by Ms.Informed13
Summary: 'She shipwrecks her veins right against the rocks of him, turning her insides out so that they're swimming in the red sea of her sacrifice. But she knows it's too much and before she can stop herself, she's drowning in everything she's trying to give him.' Or, eight times Quinn gives herself away. (Eventual Faberry)


******A/N- this is something that's been on my computer for forever and I finally got around to posting it. It's a bit different than my usual stories so give it a shot.**

* * *

******One- Finn**

...

___"And the rest is rust and stardust"- Nabokov_

..

"Quinn." he gasps breathlessly as their lips part for moments before plunging back together. He's sweet enough and reminds her of a lost puppy looking for someone to love him so she lets him keep going.

His hands explore up her arms, slowly raking up the bare skin he finds to her shoulders. She is perched above him and just going with it.

He moans and she remains silent, studying his excitement beneath her.

When he tires of this and they lay quietly side by side, Quinn thanks him in her mind for his not pushing her. Sure she loves him, but she isn't in love with him and never will be. He rolls onto his side and pulls her closer, snaking one arm around her waist and just letting it lay there.

He reminds her of innocence and young children discovering themselves for the first time. She gives him her elbows, rough and tired from hours of cheerleading. She gives him the shy quiet of the backs of her knees, young and smooth. Secret places she has been keeping to herself for years, she knows he will take them an cherish them for the regretful promise they are.

In return he gives her his heart.

It's not a fair trade- they both know it- and she cannot accept it.

When they part she doesn't miss what she's given him. For a while it was enough for him and for a while she didn't mind. But when her elbows and knees- bloody and scabbed from tripping on his playground innocence- were no longer enough to sustain their relationship, she left them behind without a backward glance.

She gets achy joints when it's cold out and now they belong to him to keep forever. She knows he'll take care of them in the winter like she never could.

* * *

******Two- Puck**

…

___"She may have looked normal on the outside but she was deliciously complicated inside." - Jeffrey Eugenides_

..

She does it without a thought. She doesn't need it really anyway, and he appreciates it far more than she ever could. She's heard the compliment more times than she can count 'You have such a pretty face' it feels like a skipping record. Scratched from overuse and losing meaning each time it's played. She just hopes that if she gives it away she'll stop hearing that line. Those words have been haunting her and no amount of ritual can expel this ghost.

"Tell me again."

"You're not fat."

Just like that, she hands him her face. Peels it off like a second skin that was in need of shedding and now that it's gone she feels vaguely freer. Like she's lost something, but it's not so much a funeral wake as a weekend party, and the sensations are the same. She tastes the same burn of alcohol mixed with regret on his lips, but she doesn't stop, she can't stop.

She thinks of the feast of Herod, of proof of death on a silver platter. But this is proof of life. Proof that she's still breathing, that she doesn't need her good looks and dazzling features to survive. He takes it without hesitation and offers nothing in return. She doesn't ask.

With him it's not about an innocent give and take. Not a clumsy discovery. It's hot and fast. It's as equally brainless as it is breathless. He sucks the air from her lungs and it takes all the strength she still has to keep them safe in her chest. Even though he takes her breath away, she won't give them up, not yet. Not to him.

Because it's Puck and because she knows that in the morning he'll be gone and she'll be so very alone once again.

* * *

******Three- Beth**

When her baby is born, the first thing Quinn notices is her eyes. She has Quinn's eyes.

They're the most piercing hazel orbs that she's ever seen and Quinn is struck by the wisdom that she can see deep within them. She wants to give everything to her girl.

But she can't. And she knows it.

So she gives her baby her own eyes. She pulls them out and cradles them like she does Beth's delicate head before bestowing them upon the girl like prized family pearls. Giving her to them to keep as a treasure, a reminder of everything her mother wanted for her but could never provide.

The first time she hears Beth's tinkling laughter, it takes her breath away and she so nearly forgets how to breathe. She swears she can feel her heart stop beating in her chest for a second and it's all she can do to not burst into tears.

She doesn't. Instead she gives Beth the stars of her smile. Makes a galaxy with the satin of her mouth and traces constellations with her tongue. If nothing else, she has to teach her daughter that she can always find her way wherever she needs to go by following the light of her mother's smile. That her love for the girl is as infinite as all the galaxies and cannot be contained.

She feels unbelievably empty when she says goodbye for the last time. But she knows it's for the best and so she doesn't miss her eyes for a second, she can already tell there's nothing more beautiful she'll be able to see than her child's happiness. Nothing will make her smile wider than Beth's laughter. When her daughter leaves, she takes the stars of Quinn's smile and the sky has never been darker.

* * *

******Four- Judy**

…

___"Chaos is a friend of mine." - Bob Dylan_

..

Quinn dyes her hair pink. She stays out late. She avoids her mother like the plague.

She knows how much it hurts Judy, but she can't bring herself to face it. The first time she smokes, she gives her mother the backs of her hands.

She feels it is some sort of repayment for all they times she would blow her mother off while insisting 'I know that like the back of my hands'.

Now Judy will know the backs of her hands better than anything else.

She does it as soon as she can, doesn't want them to be stained with the blood she's been living in. Quinn is Lady MacBeth and the spots just aren't washing off anymore. Each one of her trespasses (against her friends, her family, herself) is imprinted on her like a freckle- part of her skin.

She wants to give her hands to her mother before they're unrecognizable, red and raw. Instead she gifts her mother the soft pink skinned hands that once held hers when they crossed roads. The ones she finger painted with and that supported her in her first cartwheel.

There isn't a doubt in her mind Judy will care for them- a solid remainder of her fleeting daughter. Because the first time Quinn comes home smelling like smoke and alcohol, her pupils completely blown, her mother doesn't say a word. Quinn hates it.

She storms upstairs and takes a shower, desperately scrubbing every trace of the party she had been at off her skin.

It takes three washes before she no longer smells smoke in her hair.

When she goes back down, pink hair in a dark pony tail, she can hear her mother crying in the kitchen. It breaks her heart. She begins crying too, she's not as quiet as she thinks she is and her mother sees her. They briefly hold eye contact before Quinn runs up to her room. Later that night when her mother walks by the room on her way to her own, she pauses in the doorway to look at her little girl pretending to be asleep.

Silently, she tiptoes into the room and presses a gentle kiss to her temple and running a thumb over her cheek.

When she leaves, silent tears escape Quinn's eyes.

She wants to be able to give her mother so much more, her mother's given her everything. But she can't reciprocate.

* * *

******Five- Brittany**

…

___"I'm the one you tell your fears to. There will never be enough of us." - Lorde Buzzcut Season_

..

She's the first one that Quinn sees after.

That's how Quinn begins to catalogue her life into the before and the after. Before she was a dancer, after she was helpless. Before she was unstoppable, after she couldn't start.

When she wakes up in the hospital the other blonde is there, one hand holding onto Quinn's hand lightly rubbing around where the IV is protruding. She sees Santana there too, in the chair next to Brittany curled in on herself, and her mother is in the opposite corner. All three of them are asleep.

From that day forward, Brittany visits religiously. Most times with Santana in tow, sometimes with others from Glee club. But she is always there. It's become routine, Quinn wakes up, spends a couple of hours trying to wiggle her toes, Brittany visits with a blueberry muffin as a peace offering, and they watch old movies on Netflix until she has to leave for cheer practice.

One day when it's just the two of them, Brittany leaning over onto Quinn's shoulder so she can see the movie playing on the laptop on the hospital bed tray table, Quinn gives the blonde her spine.

It's broken and mangled. Held together with pins and screws, cold heartless metal- the things that sky scrapers are built from. But she's not strong enough to be a building. Because aside from the steel in her spine, she's only skin and bones.

But Brittany doesn't mind. She takes it like it's the most valuable thing she's ever been given and polishes it so it gleams. She cherishes it as her trophy, it's proof that they're both here, proof that they're alive, that they've made it through. Quinn doesn't need it anymore, she has Brittany to hold her up and support her.

* * *

******Six- Dr. Emerson**

…

___"It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty." - Jonathan Safran Foer_

..

Quinn's a freshman at Yale. She's lonely, she's confused, and she's vulnerable. He's unavailable, he's older, and he doesn't really care about her.

But when they collide for the first time during his office hours, Quinn can't help herself as she falls into him. She's sore and tired and just so through with pretending. She's not strong enough to hold herself up and he's just there.

He teaches Advanced Literary Critique, and he's always talking in intelligent sentence fragments, making his prose sound like poetry. He says things like 'let your blood pump straight down from your ventricle to your pen and flow onto your page like the ink of your soul.'

So that's just what she does. She shipwrecks her veins right against the rocks of him, turning her insides out so that they're swimming in the red sea of her sacrifice. But she knows it's too much and before she can stop herself, she's drowning in everything she's trying to give him. It's not the first time she's cut herself open for someone (taken a knife to her own flesh and dug deep) but it's the first time she begins to notice the lack when she sews herself back together. She feels an emptiness that she never expected and it scares her when the sobs of her loneliness echo back through the blank cavern of her torso.

When they part it is with the most sour taste in Quinn's mouth, she doesn't know how to make it go away. She chases it with anything she can get her hands on- cheap alcohol at frat parties, cigarettes collected from boys like trinkets of affection, cute girls. It's not enough and she knows there's only one who can really make her forget but she can't bring herself to make that call. So she sobs in solitude.

* * *

******Seven- Santana**

…

___"And after a long time the boy came back again. 'I'm sorry, Boy,' said the tree, 'but I have nothing left to give you.'" - The Giving Tree_

..

Their relationship was always explosive. They spent most of high school rocketing off of each other, taking innocent casualties and coming away with battle scars. But they always ended up back together.

From the first day of cheerleading camp their freshman year, Santana knew that there was something missing with Quinn, something just not all there. It didn't drive her away though, it endeared her and made her want to fill that hole.

That's just what she tried to do. With sleepovers and smiles, movies and mall trips, back hand springs and banana splits. She spent the better part of their first years of highschool trying to fill the blonde back up.

But there were some missing pieces that even she couldn't replace.

When they finally do fall together at Mr. Schuester's wedding, Quinn doesn't know what to give Santana. Her sinner's hands were sold to the highest bidder, her heart's been off the market since before she can remember, and she suddenly feels an unbelievable sense of being lost.

But she's not the only one.

Santana can feel the emptiness of the blonde and it nearly makes her cry when Quinn offers up her own tears instead. Long ago the blonde thought that she had cried herself dry, but they keep falling uncontrollably.

So she gathers them up and gives them to Santana, if there's one thing she's learned from the Latina in all their years of being friends it's that salt water heals everything- tears, rain, the ocean. If you let it wash over you, you'll come away cleansed and right now, that's really all Quinn needs.

* * *

******Eight - Rachel**

…

___"all my soul within me burning…" - Edgar Allen Poe_

..

It doesn't happen for the longest time. Like the crescendo of a slowly building symphony, it was years in the making. Years spent laying the groundwork of denial and hatred that eventually built up to the foundation of their relationship.

But when it finally does happen, there is nothing that compares.

Quinn feels her heart going to the home it had been forever destined to go in Rachel's chest. No reservations, no hold back, she gives everything she has left to Rachel. She doesn't think it will ever be enough, her cut and paste medley of left overs that nobody else wanted. But for Rachel it's everything she could have ever hoped for because once all of that is stripped away she sees Quinn for what she really is- empty and brutally honest.

It is an interesting paradox to be so full of everything you have given away. Quinn doesn't stay empty for long though. Rachel spends years filling her back up. Pouring in joy and compassion in a unique brew of love to build the blonde over again.

Rachel stitches up wounds opened years ago in high school. Fills in missing parts yanked away by past lovers, family, and friends. There are scars left, ones below the skin that Quinn never thought would heal. She thought that the rough and pebbled scar tissue would persist but somehow Rachel smooths everything over again, makes her shiny and new.

It takes years before Quinn figures out how to be whole again. When she does, Rachel is there for her.

Together they reach for their dreams. Rachel made it to Broadway and Quinn became a literature professor at Yale. Their two girls are the mirror image of Rachel, all brown hair and deep chocolate eyes, they fix Quinn like she never could have anticipated and she learns to give everything to them in their turn. As does Rachel.

With those three, Quinn never feels empty.

* * *

******Hope you all liked it, leave a review telling me what you thought. Should I do more stories in this style? Was it weird? did that give you happy Faberry fluffs to fulfill you for today?**


End file.
